2006-07 SIGHAN Report
There is a new slate of officer bearers as indicated in 2 below. Since
SIGHAN’s focus is on NLP research involving the prime example of a
non-Alphabetic language in the world, efforts have been made to improve and
augment ties between the ACL community and the large community of
researchers and research organizations in places such as China.
The following is a summary report.
1. Workshop Organization
One major event for the year was the 5th SIGHAN Workshop, held
in conjunction with COLING/ACL-2006 in Sydney, Australia, 22-23 July 2006.
The workshop was co-chaired by Hwee Tou Ng and Olivia Kwong. There
were 24 submissions received, 8 of which were accepted for oral paper
presentations and 6 as posters.
The 3rd International Chinese Language Processing Bakeoff was also
organized in conjunction with SIGHAN-5, coordinated by Gina Levow and
Olivia Kwong. There were two shared tasks, namely automatic Chinese word
segmentation and named entity recognition. Altogether 29 teams
representing 29 organizations in 8 territories participated in the Bakeoff, which
have set a new record. This year the benchmark corpora used in the
evaluation also drew a new contributor : Microsoft [China], in addition to the
regulars such as Academia Sinica [Taipei], Peking University, University of
Colorado [originating from U Penn], and City University of Hong Kong. The 6th
SIGHAN Workshop is intended to be held in conjunction with IJCNLP-08 in
Hyderabad, India, 11-12 January 2008. SIGHAN-6 will be co-chaired
by Haizhou Li and Olivia Kwong. A workshop proposal has recently
been submitted. We also plan to concurrently organise the 4th International
Chinese Language Processing bakeoff, and we have reached
initial agreement with the Verification Center on Chinese Language and
Character Standards of the State Language Commission of PRC, and the
Chinese LDC, to co-organise the event. Additionally, advanced discussions
are underway for a panel on the status quo of automatic word segmentation of
Chinese and related undertakings, to be jointly conducted by the Chinese
Academy of Sciences, SIGHAN, and the Chinese Information Processing
Society at the biennial conference of the latter in Dalian, China in August
2007.
The issues relevant to tokenization and automatic segmentation of texts
in mostly west and southeast Asian languages and transferable experience
from competitive events such as the SIGHAN Bakeoffs were shared with
participants of the conference on Regional Consultation on Local Language
Computing Policy in Developing Asia, organized in Bhutan by the PAN
localization project based in Pakistan.
2. SIG Compliance
The current SIGHAN officers are:
Benjamin Tsou (Chair)
Dan Jurafsky (Vice-Chair)
Maosong Sun (Treasurer)
Gina Levow (Secretary / Web Master)
The webpage of SIGHAN is located at http://www.sighan.org, containing
a statement of purpose and the list of officers and information officers
from individual regions, and the constitution can be found
at http://www.sighan.org/constitution.htm. We are proposing a constitutional
change on adding an at-large-member and are in the process of holding a vote
among members. The issue will be further discussed in the SIGHAN
business meeting in the next workshop.